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Adam Fell’s second collection, Dear Corporation (H_NGM_N Books, 2013), is written to the gods of the twenty first century, those entities capable of bending the course of history that are simultaneously indifferent to the lives of people who will live through it. Fell’s epistles are survey responses given as manifestos, comment cards in the form of maltov cocktails.

Fell’s Dear Corporation is a call to riot. It screams in the face of welling indifference and easy neo-liberalism that characterizes the opening of our new millennium. He writes:

Politicians never counted on us. Wall Street never counted on us. The cadaverous yuppies and their screaming vegan babies never counted on us. Investment bankers swear they keep finding our faces burned into their zeroes and ones like belligerent, binary Marys. They feel our fingers down the throats of their housing bubbles, our teeth foreclosing on the napes of their uninsured necks. To put it more delicately: I want you to fuck the fiscal responsibility out of me. I want you to fuck me until universal health care. We are the only thing that is too big to fail, so put down the briefcase and come skin the rabbit with me. (22)

Fell wants to stain the immaculate corporate surfaces over which we crawl like ants looking for spilled Coke. He strips out the eggshell-painted drywall, pulls up the laminate flooring made to look like real wood grain to show us the chaos a corporation is trying to cover with its flattening of human experience. Fell states:

[S]o let me get my wolf cub teeth right into the deer heart of our matter: there is a brimming and braveness and feral intelligence to you that I’m taken with. Where I suspect a wilderness may be, a wilderness usually is, and I can’t help but explore. My dear Corporation, you are the PJ Harvey of the investment banking world, the Margaret Atwood of subprime mortgage lenders. You say you are unfamiliar with the taste of man, but I know a dive bar in Red Hook that proves you a liar. (54)

Fell uses the corporation to represent everything that isn’t corporeal. Just as the word no longer contains the human body, the corporation Fell addresses is one that has moved past the human experience, and the letters Fell writes could be as easily addressed to Target as the US government.

In Dear Corporation Fell wants to anchor humanity in people instead of the illusory capital, both economic and cultural, held in corporations. Fell writes:

Adam and Eve with the apple unbit never had to un-coin their eyes to imbalance, inequity, the ingenuity and ignorance and incessant allure of the world. To wake in the dark of the woods and realize we have been created at all is to realize we have not always been, that we will not always be. We are not born to stake a claim, but to claim a stake in each other, to burn alive if needed in the pure resurrection of our simultaneous decay. (27)

Fell locates himself with people. Fell is like a human submarine sending out waves of noise in the hopes of having someone give him a signal as to where he is. Ultimately, Dear Corporation is a letter asking us to write back.

And that’s what I found so successful about this book, it’s willingness to be human, to say anything to get us to connect with it as a human document. Dear Corporation is prosaic. It digresses. It writes vaguely inappropriate postcards. It sings with the radio when it’s drunk. It may, at times, lack artifice, but never art.

Yesterday, Matt Hart traveled from Cincinnati to Cleveland in order to read and discuss his poems for the second installment of the Poets of Ohio reading series at Case Western Reserve University. In my introduction to the event, I wrote the following with regard to his fifth full-length collection of poetry, Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013):

In a review I wrote of Matt Hart’s book Debacle Debacle at the beginning of last June, I noted how the poems both mediate and meditate upon the “complex emotional circumstances of our daily lives,” ratcheting up the tension between “excitement” and “irritation” in order to generate productive forces that harness a certain poetic energy formed at the confluence of these competing emotional and psychic states. Or, as the speaker of the book’s title poem says:

Essential it is to struggle, but struggle’s

merely tension, and tension can be a thing of balance
or irritation, confusion or song. I’m singing in tension
with the not singing. I’m living in tension with the forces

out to kill me. We’re living in tension because we’re
different human beings, and living in excitement
that we’re so much the same. (15)

While I still believe this “tension” is a central concern of Debacle Debacle, my re-reading of the collection during the past two weeks has offered me a new conceptual framework through which to think about these poems.

As a side note—before I explain the new framework further—poetry’s ability to provide multiple interpretations and experiences when our contexts shift happens to be one of it’s many characteristics of which I am enamored. While, certainly, this trait is not exclusive to poetry, the genre seems to thrive on the potential of its texts to open up to an assortment of readings, interpretations, and possibilities.

And what is this new understanding of Hart’s collection that I experienced of late? Well, when re-engaging the book, I was keenly aware of the manner in which the poems name their historic and aesthetic communities. Beginning with the collection’s opening epigraph—which is Breton’s admonition that “A poem must be a debacle of the intellect”—as well as a slew of touchstones throughout the book that reference Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Berrigan, Pound, and Whitman; and, finally, to the concluding poem’s Wallace Stevens’ epigraph, Hart creates and names a lineage of influence that shapes the contours of these poems.

Debacle Debacle, though, does more than just outline Hart’s aesthetic and historic communities; it also sings the praise of his contemporary communities, by which I mean his friends, family, and poetry peers. For instance, he thanks “the sky for [the contemporary poet] Adam Fell” (39), he reminisces about his friend “Jane” who recently became “entrenched / in Brooklyn” (49), he references his friend, poet, and publisher Nate Pritts who drives “his auto on automatic pilot feeling ebullient” (63), and he composes a poem to his then four year old daughter in order to “tell [her] some things” while he’s “in perfect alignment” (72).

Yes, this is a social book, at least to the extent that the poems therein declare to and for whom they belong. But if Hart does not name you or me or someone else for that matter, this does not mean that we are not welcome to participate in the poems. In fact, Debacle Debacle can be read as an invitation to those who share like-minded poetics and sensibilities. Yes, “everybody’s on fire beside” (5) him, not just his close confidantes; indeed, Hart sings in a “common language” (80) where “Every single one / of us [is] a hymn” to the weird, to the wired, to anyone willing to “open our books” (74) and join in this “marvelous” human “predicament” (75).

Below is a video of Hart reading his poem “Upon Seeing Again the Thriving” from the event:

The next event for the Poets of Ohio reading series will take place on Thursday, 13 February when the Yellow Springs, OH poet Heather Christle will join us for an evening of poetry and discussion. For more details, please visit the Poets of Ohio website.

This past Saturday, the Big Big Mess reading series in Akron, OH, once again, hosted some out of town readers for their monthly poetry spectacular. Two of the readers were the Rochester, NY poets Jennifer H. Fortin and Nate Pritts, both of who gave terrific performances. Below are videos of each, their heads balls of light and backed with a scrim of skulls.

For three weeks in August I drove 4,113 miles in my blue Toyota Yaris for the Finally Be Friends tour in support of my book, How We Light, from H_NGM_N BKS. More importantly though, the trip was an elaborate excuse to overlap wounds with so many incredible poets, friends, and new friends. “Travel” and “poem” are bound in my mental lexicon. Long poems, long trips, they’re the same for me. It’s fun to go a long way just to be a person somewhere else. So, avoiding the cliche, it’s not that poems “take me somewhere,” that they transport me. The poems themselves are somewhere. And not only that, they create the conditions to grasp the coordinates of an elsewhere (internal and external) that we often describe as mystery or the unknown, a space of bewilderment (proper to Fanny Howe’s description of the word). An impossible pleasure.

Couches are what make this all possible. Any poet who has traveled to read will tell you this. And I think it’s important to acknowledge how necessary and incredible an act that is. Many of us know each other through and in poetry and our poems, and the truth is that a lot of us don’t really know each other (or not yet), that we’re not friends in the most traditional sense, but that poetry is the community we share and build our friendships around. We came for the poems but found out pretty quick there was a lot more there. So many of my poems are directly for friends, but “for” isn’t quite right. Rather, the poems model and extend and accentuate every kind of relationship. The poems are all we have. Also, each other. So when a poet is in your city, when they bring their body’s voice into your lush corner of being, to offer them that couch, that air mattress, that cup of coffee in the morning is nothing less than a spiritual pact.

H_NGM_N Books recently released Nick Sturm’s debut collection of poems How We Light. Like most of Sturm’s work, the book exhibits a certain exuberance wherein the speaker makes claims such as:

There’s nothing
I’d rather be doing than having
elaborate hedonistic parties Than using
my mouth to love you (28)

To some extent, the book’s enthusiasm for life, for friends, for love, for poetry acts as a “fuck you” to the “Darkness” (41) that sometimes can envelop of our emotional and psychic states. But more than functioning as an antidote or counterbalance to negative aspects of thought and life, these poems also work as affirmation, in and of themselves. Take, for instance, the conclusion of the collection’s final poem “I Feel Yes.” The speaker champions experiences that are “both meaningful / and valuable”:

because meaning and value
are unbearably soldered to the meat
of living, so that we have nothing but happiness (88)

Yes, these poems are just as much (if not more) about creating “happiness” than dismantling the “Darkness.”

Over the past couple of week, Sturm answered some questions for me over email, so as to provide a bit more insight into the creation of his manuscript and offered some ideas about the writing found within his book.

Much of your first full-length collection of poems, How We Light (H_NGM_N BOOKS, 2013), contains material from four chapbooks that were released over the course of the past couple years. I was hoping you could talk about the process of re-imagining these poems in service of a broader context. By that, I mean, how did your relationship to these particular chapbooks (and the poems therein) alter or shift during the sequencing process? Did you learn anything new or different about them when considering their placement in the book? What types of resonances did you discover between them? To that end, were there any points of friction or dissonance that were problematic for you or need to be resolved? How did the publication of these chapbooks help you along, ultimately, in the development of How We Light?

Chapbooks deserve their own lives as chapbooks. They’re a vital publishing form – intimate, textural, concentrated, audacious. They put pressure on how we think about and about making books. Which is to say I don’t think chapbooks exist only to serve what we call, simply because of quantity, full-length books. Four chapbooks that come to mind as resolutely full-length, however you want that to mean: Matthew Rohrer’s A Ship Loaded With Sequins Has Gone Down, Bernadette Mayer’s The Helens of Troy, NY, Carrie Lorig’s nods., Dana Ward’s The Squeakquel. Thinking about this answer, it’s important for me to say that when the process of talking about the book began I did not have a “complete” book, not at all. Nate Pritts, the editor-hero of H_NGM_N, and I had a long conversation about this exact question: how do chapbooks come together into a book? At first I resisted dismantling the chapbooks to make a book, but the problem was exactly that I was thinking about the process as “dismantling” – the chapbooks have their own autonomy and time – it’s not possible to take them apart. But I couldn’t really account for the parallax between the chapbooks and the time of the book until I had newer poems to stand in. Once those poems existed, the shape of How We Light became intuitive. I realized I didn’t have to “make” an organic emotional structure – I had to grow it, get wet in it, be hurt by it, and that’s mostly a matter of failing, flailing, and having fun.

How We Light contains two long poems: the title poem, located midway through the book, and “I Feel Yes,” which concludes the collection. Could you talk a bit about long poems, generally speaking: What do you they offer you as a writer? What long poems by other poets have influenced your writing? Why and how? How does your process differ when composing a long poem? What are the difficulties inherent to that process? More specific to How We Light, how do you think the two poems in your book affect the reader’s experience, as well as alter or shift the manner in which we read the shorter poems?

For a while I was only writing poems that fit on a page, and that was necessary – I needed to write a lot of poems. As you’ve talked about, most of the poems in my first chapbook, What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!, play around the shape of a sonnet – they’re all quite dense. When it came out, my reaction to its material presence in the world was to write something sprawling and digressive. I had been reading Anselm Berrigan’s book-length poem Notes from Irrelevance and Padgett Powell’s novel of questions, The Interrogative Mood, and I sat down and in one weekend wrote “I Feel Yes.” At the time, it was a way of unbalancing myself. Going past the edge of the page over and over was exhilarating, if only because I was curious to know what would happen if I kept not stopping. Over the last year I’ve been mostly only writing long poems, which means I haven’t been writing many poems. But that’s not true. I have been writing a lot of poems, they’re just absorbed into larger patterns after the fact. The idea of writing a discrete poem on a single page is kind of impossible to me right now. And that’s not a choice I made. The radical shifts in the textures of the circumstances of my life made long form poems a necessity. As far as process, it means my thinking is more accumulative, disparate, open-ended. I never feel like I’m finishing anything anymore. That makes me anxious and unbounded at the same time. Sometimes it feels more like translating than writing, as if there’s an original poem somewhere, I don’t know where, and I’m slowly distorting it into this new thing. Nevertheless, I spend the time there because long form poems allow for collaboration with the indeterminate, self-reflexive mystery and magic of the forces that I feel most (non)human inhabiting. In How We Light, I imagine the long poems making the other poems forget they are poems. I mean that they might create the possibility of poetic potential that is greater than any distinct poem. No one wants to just read poems.

What types of projects or poems are you currently working on/writing? How do you see your newer poems working with (or against) the poems in How We Light? Is there a development or progression in your writing that engages or moves away from your previous concerns? How so and why?

I can’t seem to write if I’m not writing with someone else, so a few collaborative projects with the usual suspects have been underway. More than anything right now I’m just soaking in things. I’m taking three amazing classes, a theory survey, Postmodern Tragedy, and Žižek’s Politics, that are stretching and overlapping all the patterns, and teaching two classes, one on Postmodern Joy and another on short story and short film. Jeff Hipsher and I started a new reading series in Tallahassee called Dear Marge, Hello. I’m watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen movies. I read and loved Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Robert Duncan. I’m helping edit an essay-anthology of experimental female poets for The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. I’m eating more obscure fruit. I was lucky to be able to spend most of August doing a tour of readings from How We Light and after spending over 4,000 miles with those poems and friends I was able to see the shape of a new manuscript called Outside in the Aporia Days. It has an epigraph from a Prince song. I don’t know, but I want that to be a sure sign of progress. One of the new poems is here in PEN. Whatever this book turns out to be, it’s coming out of my obsession with long poems, which doesn’t necessarily mean my concerns are changing, just transferring. I recently edited an issue of NÖÖ Weekly focusing on long poems and sequences – I am letting those poems and poets permeate me. I’ve been working to be more permeable in general lately, more weather-like, amalgamated. I have a reading list for the winter that includes Alice Notley, Jules Verne, and Peter Sloterdijk. Other than that, I’m happy to watch so many other poets’ successes lately, like forthcoming books from Tyler Gobble and Alexis Pope, both from Coconut, and Mike Krutel’s chapbook Best Poems from Big Lucks. I’m just going to keep writing poems with these people until everything is a skylight.

Matt McBride’s Cities Lit by the Light Caught in Photographs (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012) is a series of portraits composed of urban decay and the castoff detritus of consumer culture that follows, at least thematically, the lineage of Eliot’s apocalyptic vision in The Waste Land. Throughout the chapbook, image after image of a city’s forgotten or damaged remains accrue, building around the reader the architecture of a modern wasteland. Take, for instance, the following excerpts:

an abandoned gas station
shuttered with plywood
…

The phone disconnected
but we got messages anyway:
the kind of things
dentures would say
after their owner died

…

a thousand set of Russian dolls
haphazard and mismatched
amidst a field of broken televisions.

…

Each basement was a museum
of progressively rustier stationary bikes.
You’d watch a blank VHS take
‘til it stopped

…

All the area rugs
are horridly stained

…

Mannequins, left outside
fuzz with mold

In Cities Lit by the Light Caught in Photographs, these images and others saturate the book’s landscape with a sense of failure, symbolized by the rusted, haphazard, and dilapidated refuse populating the poems.

And just as inanimate objects become discarded remnants, people in these poems have also died or have been forgotten. All that remains of them are ghosts who are “too alone / to be lonely.” Even when they’re encouraged to “feel you are wanted,” the ghost of these poems are readily aware that they’re not “wanted most of the time.” Yes, humans transform into ghosts because even they too are perishable.

Of course, one could argue that the city and those citizens not yet forgotten have disposed of outmoded objects and persons because they’re exchanging them for new and shiny replacements more fit for the future. But in the poem “Cities of the Future,” we learn that this is not the case:

Rusty coats hanger
bang against each other
on tree branches.

The air
smells all hospital.

Our blood feel like soap inside us.

We have people landfills.

We are not uncontent.

It would appear that in the wasteland of McBride’s chapbook, the future is still “Rusty” and the chemical odor of a “hospital” fills the air in order to cover the scent of the “people landfills” were carcasses pile on top of one another. The most frightening aspect of the poem is the collective admission that “We are not uncontent.” No, civilization in this wasteland might not be content, per se, but it’s certainly not discontent. Instead, they look passively at “a scaffolding used to pull stars out by their roots, a kind of urban renewal for the sky,” watching the “urban renewal” of the heavens, but too “not uncontented” to do much about their own plight.

To further compound matters, looking back in reverie to a better time gone by is not an option either. Admonishing those who would look to the past, the speaker of the title poem claims that “Memory is the only pornography”; and later in the collection’s final poem “Cities of Perpetual Distraction,” the speaker declares: “Nostalgia’s a kind of cancer.” Yes, to think of a time passed both fetishizes the past and eats away at our current livelihood. As such, there is no escape in the past or the future; there is only the urban wasteland of the present, which we are complicit in creating.

This, of course, begs the question: does a collection of poetry need to offer its audience an escape, redemption, or a solution to the problems we face in life and literature? Or can a collection of poems simply offer an apocalyptic vision without hope? Cities Lit by the Light Caught in Photographs seems to favor the latter of these two options. While such a stance might not sit well with some, the failing economies and urban decay of cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and any number of Rust Belt cities argue, sadly, that such a wasteland is already upon us. McBride, who is a native of Dayton, OH and a current Columbus, OH resident, no doubt is quite familiar with these landscapes.

in these “hideous” and “abject” images, Atkins creates a singular, Cleveland-based beauty in his language and the sounds it produces. Yes, while his content focuses on the death of a city, he enlivens that very same material through his poetic technique. Through an aestheticized vision of Cleveland, then, perhaps writers and artists living here (and other cities along the Great Lakes) can find an answer to the manner in which we engage our troubled city: acknowledging its decline, but doing so in a way that honors its inherent beauty.

One could say the same thing with regard to McBride’s poems. Indeed, the content may be harrowing, but through the act of writing poetry and aestheticizing the decay, we can discover beauty in the destruction.

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